Bloom Into You

Fifteen-year-old Yuu Koito is a huge fan of shoujo manga; she loves reading stories about young girls falling in love. She loves all the classic romance tropes: love at first sight, the man sweeping the woman off her feet, and sharing gorgeous, blissful kisses under the stars.

Reading literature brimming with this love and happiness through romance fills Yuu with a sense of longing, and she can’t wait to fall in love and experience all these magical feelings for herself.

Until a boy confesses his love for her, and she feels… nothing.

So she panics. What’s wrong with her? This is the moment she’s been waiting for. And yet, when someone finally confesses and tells her he loves her, Yuu finds herself feeling more anxious than excited, and trepidation rather than happiness. When love finally enters her life, she doesn’t have any of the emotions she expected herself to.

Deeply confused, and more than a little disappointed, she is awed when she sees an older classmate respectfully yet confidently turn down a love confession. Thinking they must have similar views on love and on relationships, she turns to this girl, Nanami Touko, for advice, and they soon become friends.

After a short while, Nanami Touko tells Yuu that she is in love with her as well.

And this time, Yuu feels…

…nothing.

The end.

Just kidding. Welcome to Bloom Into You.

Bloom Into You is an incredible story, because it leads you believe that the message of the story is about finding true love. And while this is very much a love story in nature, the real message of the show is so unbelievably not that. The message is that this true love, this perfectly constructed, fictional depiction of romance, does not exist in the real world, because people are not perfect and relationships are not simple. Love is more more multi-faceted than media makes it out to be.

Yuu is a fascinating character. She is curious about what falling in love is like, but comes to realize that it’s much different than she thought. In fact, romance is making all her connections and relationships a whole lot harder. It becomes more of a burden than anything else, this love stuff. She is unwilling to lie to the boy or to Nanami about feeling a magical pull to them that she does not. She contemplates why she put it on a pedestal for all this time, while cautiously yet actively pursuing a friendship that slowly yet surely crosses the lines and boundaries a platonic friendship would not. She is attracted to Youko and likes her very much, but she can’t find that passionate love feeling within her, and she starts wondering if she is even capable of feeling love at all.

Nanami is a great character as well. She sometimes has the unfortunate pushiness that is sadly typical in a lot of romance anime, but it isn’t taken to the extreme, and she’s always receptive of Yuu’s boundaries. Interestingly, she is not upset at all that Yuu does not return her feelings. As someone who struggles so much with perfectionism, she feels that to her core she is unwilling and incapable of being vulnerable enough to be in a relationship. She emulates this perfect version of herself, but over time Yuu sees the cracks in her exterior and gets to know the real her, the her that is anxious and unsure and terrified of failure. She never hides her feelings for Yuu, and those feelings only become stronger the closer they grow.

Every aspect of this show is rich with nuance. Yuu and Nanami’s relationship is exciting and surprising at every turn. Yuu’s very human curiosity about being with Touko physically and even romantically, but finding herself unable to commit to “love” right away, is something I think a lot of watchers can relate to. And even though Touko is deeply in love with Yuu, she truly sees Yuu as a close friend first and foremost. Her love is not bound by romance or by her crush. She is able to push her feelings to the side enough to make Yuu feel comfortable and loved and cared for in the way she needs until she is ready, if she ever is ready, to return her feelings, and that was beautiful to watch.

There is debate in the anime community over whether Yuu is meant to be an asexual character. Some argue that she is, others argue she certainly is not. And that’s the intriguing thing; it’s not made super obvious which is the case. During my initial watch of this anime, I found myself thinking that Yuu being a lesbian/queer and her being asexual, which is a spectrum within itself, could absolutely go hand in hand.

In my (not so) expert opinion, and after reading the entire manga, I firmly believe that this is the case. Yuu is great representation of a demisexual/demiromantic character. She does show explicit romantic and physical attraction to Touko, but only after they get to know each other much more intimately.

Yuu spent so much time ingesting heterosexual depictions of romance that she was unable to fully understand herself. This resulted in her not being able to recognize or identify her feelings for Touko, even as they develop romantically. As she sees Touko’s confidence in herself and her own sexuality, she realizes things about herself more and more that weren’t so clear or simple before. It’s an honest, very human depiction of getting to know yourself, growing into yourself—even blooming into yourself, perhaps—and learning over time what love looks like for you, because love never looks the same for everyone.

After achieving this comfort and connection, we see Yuu realize that she has truly fallen in love with Touko, and it wasn’t this perfect journey. It was confusing, and it was scary, and it didn’t happen all at once; it happened over time, and she isn’t able to pinpoint exactly how or why it happened—it just did, and that is okay.

To many people, love is not this simple, contrived magical miracle that hits you and sends you into immediate bliss. Love is complicated and weird and kind of awkward, and it can suck just as much as it can be amazing, and it can even happen to you without you realizing it—and all of that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

That is the true message of Bloom Into You, and that’s why I love it.

Thanks for reading! ♥️